Every few years, someone (usually a group that stands to make money from it) helpfully pins down a feminine beauty ideal. Recently, a school textbook said 36-24- 36 as ‘ideal’ body for women. This at a time when fashion, advertisements, movies are moving towards adopting a more inclusive approach, and women are reclaiming their desirability and sexuality by becoming more body positive.
The pinning down of feminine desirability to dry numbers is an act of commodifying it, so that there is a value attached to it when it is traded and possessed. The truth is, there are as many ideals of beauty as there are people — there is no accounting for taste, as we know. But when we have an ideal, it helps to use it to sell things such as life insurance; or add to totems of success (read: model/trophy wife).
Luckily, it doesn’t affect the self-worth of all women, who can discern the body types needed to perform various jobs. “Yes, I’m not built like a super model, says 32-year-old voice-over artist Sahar Suhail Deshmukh. She has been called moti for years. “I am immune to it; it never made me want to lose weight because my love for food is far greater than my will to change my body,” she says.
Sociologist and academician Nandini Sardesai feels that the changing standards of beauty are a result of changes in cultural context rather than the passage of time or what men want. “The West started opening up to women of colour as beauty icons after the Civil Rights movement. Similarly, the obsession with slim figures started in India only after the gym culture became popular in urban areas,” she says. People want to show off slender wives and girl-friends to fit into the urban social circles. “In semi-urban and rural India, people still prefer pleasantly plump women. The farmer wants a healthy, physically tough woman who can help in the field and do household chores,” she says.
“The ‘Size Zero’ culture was imported from European ramps to India,” says fitness expert Leena Mogre, “where women are naturally curvy. What’s wrong with having a good bustline or delightfully curvy feminine hips? However, a modern woman cannot afford to be bogged down by clogged arteries or diabetes. We owe it to ourselves more than anybody else to stay fit.”
Through this prism, a woman’s body is seen only in relation to her social obligations. While physical strength is required to carry and deliver strong babies and do hard physical labour; slenderness and a diminutive frame appears vulnerable enough to be sexually desired. So a human female body is not shown off as a trophy, but she is also viewed as prey of sexual conquest. Brrr.
